About the project

The Programmable Infrastructures Project

We use the term "programmable infrastructures" to refer to the political, economic and technological vision that advocates for the introduction of computational infrastructure onto our common infrastructures. The Programmable Infrastructures Project aims to conduct investigations into this large scale transformation with the ultimate objective to identify ways to engage and shape the course of these developments so that we can continue to have democratically managed infrastructures that serve the public interest.

With computational infrastructures we refer to the clouds and mobile devices as their accessories, concentrated in the hands of a few companies, in particular Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google. On the other hand, with common infrastructures we refer to cityscapes and their administration, systems that deliver healthcare, and education infrastructures, as well as electrical grids, roadways, railways and waterways. If common infrastructures come with extensive planning and expensive updates, the promise of programmability is that by adding a digital layer, the plans and policies of common infrastructures can be abstracted from their underlying physical constraints. This, it is claimed, will make them easy to reconfigure just like digital systems. In other words, legacy physical infrastructures can be further freed from their physical constraints and can ostensibly be made as programmable as native computational systems. However, that is not the complete story. The impact of the capture of common infrastructures by computational infrastructures includes further features some of which are the guiding themes in our project:

1. Programmability of Human Behavior
   One of the novelties in programmability is that it offers to manage human behavior. Among other things, AI refers to systems that can manage not only the performance of fixed infrastructures, but also the people circulating in them. With mobile technologies, be they phones or autonomous vehicles, everything and everyone can be nudged and optimized through continuous feedback and control. How feasible and desirable is the proposal to extend control and management of infrastructures to human behavior?
2. Dominance of Values-in-Infrastructure
   The use of clouds and services comes with a standardization of software functions that can challenge local partiesÕ ability to develop, test and validate engineering specifications in an end-to-end fashion. This can also pose a challenge to addressing context specific privacy, security and safety measures. How will we ensure that situated values are well represented and systems are accountable when we use these computational infrastructures?
3. Economics of Programmability
   Programmability means accommodating ideological, managerial, political and economic consequences of adopting it. With a commitment to programmability, we will enter another dependency relationship with technology providers. WeÕll have to pay them and all the startups that run their services on their computational infrastructure. Further, AI frameworks promote reformulating social welfare functions as a problem that can be optimized computationally rather than solved through the complex consideration and negotiation of human experience and expertise, shielding the management of infrastructures from democratic forms of control. How can public interest be assured when it is submitted to these economic terms?
4. Power Asymmetries of Cloud Providers
   We won't deny the potential benefits of programmability for both companies, public institutions and the citizens they serve. But just as the social media giants, like Facebook, find themselves struggling to respect increasing requests to democratize the operation of their networks, safeguarding an unprecedented revenue machine enabled by online advertising, how will computational infrastructureÕs relationship to the demands of global capital impact upon our ability to address environmental and other social challenges? Can democratic values and imperatives truly prevail over the bottom line?
5. Avoidance and Reshaping of Democratic Governance
   We'd like to raise the question of whether the introduction of programmability to common infrastructures will always be a choice. When startups or larger software companies like AirBnB, Google Maps or Uber, hook programmability onto common infrastructure they do so through their user base, thereby either avoiding or proactively trying to reshape the forms of public governance that oversee related domains. This suggests the usual mechanisms like contracts will not be sufficient to protect the public welfare function, giving a new dimension to private and public ordering of conflicts around common infrastructures. How will we ensure that we step into programmability in a deliberate and democratic manner?